Amazon: e-books a winner

San Francisco - For the first time ever, online retail giant Amazon.com sold more electronic books for its Kindle device than old-fashioned paper books, the website said Monday.

The sales record was achieved on Christmas Day on Friday, when people who had received a Kindle as a present logged on to the Amazon site to load it with reading fare.

Amazon said that the Kindle was the most gifted item in the company's history, but gave no sales figures for the device or the electronic book sales.

Amazon said its busiest day ever was on December 14 when customers bought 9.5 million items worldwide, equivalent to 110 items a second. Amazon said it shipped items to 178 countries and that its most popular items were the Apple iPod Touch 8GB and the Garmin Nuvi 260W GPS device.